War Baby by Tom Robinson

1983 - Location – ROSLA building, Uckfield School. War Baby was playing on the radio. Back then, I didn't know what ROSLA stood for – more on this in a bit, and I'd never heard of Tom Robinson. Years later, I realised I'd missed the best years of the Tom Robinson Band.

I'd landed up at Uckfield School knowing no one. My family had 'done a geographic' - that is, moved to a new area hoping to fix murky family dynamics. It didn't work.

Back to ROSLA – The Raising of the School-Leaving Age. In 1972, new legislation mandated that children would now leave school at sixteen, rather than fifteen. Lots of new buildings (most intended as temporary structures) sprang up, and then stayed in place for decades. Uckfield School finally got rid of its ROSLA block in 2020. While poking around online, I came across ROSLA's more interesting parent – HORSA (Hutted Operation for the Raising of the School-Leaving Age). Here is a typical HORSA building:

Quite a lot of my education (if you can call it that) took place in structures like these.

So, War Baby and post-war education policy. An unlikely link, but I remember I liked this song for the shouty intensity of 'Cause you were the first one that I ever wanted...'

Tom Robinson wrote it in Berlin, during a period of bankruptcy and partial despair. He had a bad experience one night in a gay sauna, got high, and then scribbled down the opening line – 'Only the young and the very beautiful can be so aloof...'

Tom said that 'the rest of it poured onto the page, eight, ten pages of the stuff, just hand-written, stream of consciousness stuff. And it took about a year to get those ten pages down to something you could actually sing in four minutes...'

It's reported to be the song he's most proud of – 'I think it's the most truthful song that I've written, because I didn't think about it at all.'

Here's the video (featuring Winston Churchill):